Fire Management and Burning

[Toko]

http://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/think-ou ... QOgEPmG_UV

Think out of box on fire control

March 11 2015 at 07:29am
By Brian van Wilgen


Fire is a natural feature of the Cape, a process that shapes the structure and composition of its vegetation communities, and should be managed as such, writes fire ecologist and fynbos specialist Brian van Wilgen

News reports describing the recent fires in the Cape Peninsula have referred to vegetation being “destroyed”, “ravaged” or “laid to waste”.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While the damage to houses and other structures is regrettable, the fires actually did the vegetation a favour.

The problem is that a large area was burnt all at once under conditions extremely difficult to control.

If the area had been managed by strategic burning over the past few years, much of the cost and damage could arguably have been avoided, helping Cape Town’s citizens to co-exist more amicably with the fire-prone and fire-dependent vegetation in which they have chosen to live.

Conservation agencies would like to manage the inevitable fires that occur on average every 12 years by conducting prescribed burns in late summer or early autumn. This would break the large blocks of vegetation, which have accumulated fuel since the last fire, into a mosaic of different post-fire ages.

Large fires such as those we have just witnessed would then not have been able to spread everywhere, as some areas would not yet have accumulated enough fuel.

It is, however, exceptionally difficult for conservation agencies to obtain the necessary permits to burn, because Fire Protection Associations (FPA), which must grant permits for prescribed burns, are extremely risk-averse.

In addition to a permit from the FPA, the conservation agencies require a separate smoke pollution permit from the city. This creates a bureaucratic environment in which it is near impossible for them to do the necessary burning.

The consequence is that the inevitable fire occurs under very dangerous conditions – without any permits, doing far more damage and generating far more smoke than would be done by prescribed burns.

We need a more nuanced approach to fire management that will help preserve the extraordinary rich biodiversity of the fynbos region while not posing risk to communities and local economies.

This region has been burning for hundreds of thousands of years. Fynbos requires fire in order to rejuvenate, therefore managing fynbos equates to managing fire.

The same goes for animals. Animals have persisted in this fire-prone environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Some may be killed in the fire, but many escape and the species persist.

In the past, animals displaced by fire would probably have moved to unburnt areas. But now the natural vegetation is completely surrounded by built areas, leaving no place for animals to disperse after large wildfires.

If we were to rather divide the area that has just burnt into, say, six blocks, and burn one every second year, then if a wildfire did occur only parts of the area would burn and the animals would be able to disperse to unburnt patches.

Because we have altered the environment, we need to manage it more closely for their ongoing persistence.

Alien plants such as pines and hakeas that invade the fynbos also exacerbate the fire problem by increasing fire intensity, leading to soil damage and erosion.

SANParks, in conjunction with the Working for Water programme, have reduced the cover of these aliens on the Peninsula, but their management is also tied to fires.

These alien trees are killed by fires, but for every one killed another 100 come up from seeds released after the fire.

The way to deal with this is to fell the trees, leaving the seeds to germinate and then to burn the area after about two years, killing the seedlings before they can in turn produce new seeds.

This works very well, but again the problem is that SANParks struggles to get permission to do the necessary burns, so we are left with wildfires spreading the alien trees and undoing the past valuable clearing work.

It is a cycle we need to break.

Ideally, Working on Fire should focus more on doing prescribed burns and less on preventing and extinguishing wildfires. If we are to co-exist with nature in fire-prone environments, we need to start thinking beyond the paradigm of only doing wildfire control.

I am really impressed by the ability of fund-raisers to gather millions of rand in just a day or two for the fire effort.

If we were to try to raise this type of money to support a prescribed burning programme in eight years from now, when it will again be necessary, I predict we would fail to raise even a few thousand rand.

So here is an off-the-wall proposal. Let us invest the money raised now into inflation-beating equities so that when we really need it eight years from now to do the management to reduce the impact of the next inevitable fire, we will have even more money to support this.

It will probably never happen, but we have to start thinking out of the box.

Fire is a natural feature of the Cape, a process that shapes the structure and composition of its vegetation communities, and should be managed as such.

I invite anyone who thinks that the land was “laid to waste” to hike in the mountains in the coming spring, when there will be a glorious display of flowering bulbs that is seen only after such fires, and that provides emphatic evidence of the value of fires in the fynbos.

l Professor Brian van Wilgen, from the Centre for Invasion Biology ( C·I·B) at Stellenbosch University, has over 40 years of experience as a fire ecologist in southern Africa.

[Toko]

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Learn how to burn, SANParks says

March 13 2015 at 11:54am
By Melanie Gosling

Cape Town - If SANParks had been able to carry out more prescribed burns, last week’s fires would not have been so massive or so destructive to property.

SA National Botanical Institute ecologist Tony Rebelo says if more extensive prescribed burns are not done in future, we are likely to see a major fire like last week’s sweeping through Table Mountain National Park every 15 years.

But officials say it is not a simple matter to put a match to a fynbos park ringed by a city. There is a complex, time-consuming bureaucratic process to go through, there is not always enough money to do the burns, and a big problem is the often strong opposition from some Capetonians.

The city council, which issues the legally-required permit to SANParks to burn, first has to get public comment. Opposition ranges from fears of damage to property to “no, the fire will dirty my washing”.

Park manager Paddy Gordon said on Thursday there was a major difference in attitude from Capetonians during the wildfire compared to during a prescribed burn.

“There is tons of food and drinks if we ‘bravely’ battle a wildfire, but filing cabinets full of complaints if we light the fire ourselves. Yet the prescribed burn is in the interests of the mountain, the fynbos, the recreational user, tourism and even the little goggas.”

Fynbos has evolved to be dependent on fire to regenerate. Before urbanisation, a fire of last week’s scale would have posed no problem, but ringed by a city, there is a risk. Last week’s fires damaged 13 properties, caused millions of rand of damage to infrastructure, and claimed the life of Working on Fire pilot Bees Marais.

Carly Cowell, SANParks regional ecologist for the Cape, said Cape Point and Tokai had been on the park’s list of upcoming prescribed burns. Both were part of last week’s wildfires.

“We need to harness the public support we saw in the wildfires, and turn that into support for prescribed burns. When Capetonians are asked for comment about a prescribed burn, we need them to say: ‘Oh good, yes, we need it’ instead of: ‘No, it will dirty my washing’.”

Because of the risk of a prescribed burn getting out of control, burns in the park may take place when the temperature is less than 28ºC, wind speed less than 20km/h and humidity greater than 25 percent.

In addition, there must be rainfall within a certain number of days before and after the burn. The upshot is there is an average of only 12 days a year when SANParks can do burns.

Mayoral committee member for health Siyabulela Mamkeli said the permit conditions had been determined by a team from the Fire Protection Association, SANParks, the city’s fire and rescue service, its biodiversity management and air quality management.

“Many areas of the national park abut residential areas, and the public has a right to be consulted and submit comments on applications that may affect them,” Mamkeli said.

Cape Times

[Flutterby]

Makes sense.

[Lisbeth]

SANPARKS: MORE THAN A THIRD OF TABLE MOUNTAIN FIRES A RESULT OF ARSON

SANParks has recorded 63 fires in the Table Mountain National Park since April last year.


A Working on Fire helicopter demonstrates how it collects water in the Table Mountain National Park area to put out a fire on 26 February 2020. Picture: Kaylynn Palm/EWN

Kaylynn Palm | 27.02.2020

CAPE TOWN - SANParks has recorded 63 fires in the Table Mountain National Park since April last year.

The year before there were 55 fires.

Ninety-two percent of the fires were started by people - 48% of those were by arsonists and the remainder a result of negligence.

EWN attended a media excursion where SanParks conducted a fire management display.

The alarm goes off and teams are ready for action.

They hop into a fire truck and off they go, combatting fires big or small.

SANParks said that a number of crews were used depending on the size of the fire, for example, an initial attack or extended attack.

Fire manager Phillip Prins said that NCC had been contracted to assist them with integrated fire management and also had partners including Working on Fire and Enviro Wildfire Services.

He added that if needs be, a helicopter would be dispatched.

There are three of these helicopters - one dedicated to SanParks and two for the City of Cape Town.

Prins explained that before anyone was deployed, there was a planning process so that resources were not wasted and that ultimately the fire was extinguished as soon as possible.

"Our aim is to contain the fire as soon as possible. Last year, we contained 86% of our fires within the first 90 minutes."

[Richprins]

Prins!

[Lisbeth]

TABLE MOUNTAIN BLAZE

Cape Town’s Halloween fire ignited by ‘vagrants’ — SANParks

By Tiara Walters• 2 November 2020


About 50ha of veld burnt from Deer Park in the east to Higgovale in the west across the Table Mountain’s lower frontal slope. (Photo: Daily Maverick)

As Table Mountain National Park carries the cost of expensive firefighting efforts, a community group urges creating ‘broad’ buffer zones to soften the blow of a heavy human footprint.

When Our Burning Planet arrived at the scene of the Table Mountain “Halloween” fire on Sunday morning just before 8am, fire crews were tamping down hotspots still smouldering from the night before.


The fire hit outlandishly early in a fire season that normally takes off in December. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

A nascent plume of smoke could first be seen mushrooming outward above Deer Park late Saturday afternoon. Less than an hour later, a strong southeasterly wind had driven the pall across Cape Town City Bowl, staining the sun an apocalyptic orange. Headlight beams cut across traffic as sirens howled like Halloween ghosts, even though sunset was two hours away. Twenty-four hours later, the pong of purgatory still choked the air.


Fire crews were tamping down hotspots on Sunday morning. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

About 50 hectares of veld would burn from Deer Park in the east to Higgovale in the west across the mountain’s lower frontal slope. To contain the inferno, it would take 16 firetrucks heaving with up to 6,000 litres of water per tank; 100-plus firefighters; a public-volunteer corps of refreshment caddies and, finally, the sudden, merciful death of the southeaster at about midnight.

The fire was contained about an hour later, said Philip Prins, fire manager for Table Mountain National Park.


Cape Town’s world-class battalion of city, South African National Parks and volunteer firefighters held the line against the monster flames, saving all properties but for damage to one loft in Rugby Road. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

One firefighter was reportedly admitted to hospital with injuries, although no civilians were hurt. And, while homes on the urban edge were sprayed down and evacuated, Cape Town’s world-class battalion of city, South African National Parks (SANParks) and volunteer firefighters held the line against the monster flames, saving all properties but for damage to one loft in Rugby Road — this was also attended to by fire services.

In a year of flames fanning across the globe, this was just another fire — it followed historic conflagrations in Australia, California and Oregon, and even the March blaze on Lion’s Head. Here, just west of Table Mountain, paths are still being rehabilitated after flames hollowed out parked cars and transformed 60ha of wild habitat into a shade of midnight dystopia.

Philip Prins, fire manager for Table Mountain National Park, said the fire had begun as ‘a vagrant fire’: ‘Especially near Platteklip stream going up to Tafelberg Road — there are always vagrants in that area.’

Yet, the Halloween fire was also a blaze unto itself. According to the SANParks-contracted NCC wildfire services on Sunday, this was “not a very big fire, but quite intense due to the proximity to the wildland urban interface and strong southeasterly winds… mop-up operations have begun, which could extend until Wednesday.”

The fire also hit outlandishly early in a fire season that normally takes off in December — during the Cape summer’s hot, dry nadir. Never fun, the fires — as locals will attest — are nevertheless a natural, annual baptism necessary to regenerate the fynbos floral kingdom’s extraordinary, globally famous complexities.


According to the SANParks-contracted NCC wildfire services, fires are an expensive business — it costs R36,000 an hour for just one Huey helicopter. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

Prins told Our Burning Planet that the fire had begun as “a vagrant fire”: “Especially near Platteklip stream going up to Tafelberg Road — there are always vagrants in that area.”

He added that Rob Erasmus from Enviro Wildlife Services, “a qualified investigator” habitually used by SANParks to probe park fires, had sent him a photograph of where the “vagrants had sat; of where the fire had started”.

Informal communities living in the park, said Prins, “are an ongoing problem because we manage a park within a city… a lot of these vagrants come in during the night, or late in the afternoon. They move from the city into the park; early morning, they move again from the park into the city, you know, and so it continues.”

In this instance, too, the accused fire-starters had been “long gone” before the investigation was complete, although Prins explained the incident had been reported to the park’s visitor-safety rangers “to do a patrol of the area, in case [the vagrants] should come back”.

Apart from ecological damage, fires are an expensive business, Prins pointed out.

“People don’t understand how expensive a helicopter is — the flying rate… I just received it last week. It went up from R34,000 per hour to R36,000 per hour. That’s what we pay for a Huey [helicopter]. And that’s not even the standing cost,” he explained. “If we have these big fires and we go into what we call an ‘extended attack’, we’ve got three, sometimes four, helicopters flying for eight hours a day.”

That’s just aerial resources — not even factoring in vehicles, equipment and staff salaries.

Nicky Schmidt of Friends of Table Mountain, a community forum campaigning to conserve the park as an inclusive concern for a variety of mountain users, told Our Burning Planet that, “in an urban environment like Cape Town, development and human activity complicate the reality of living in a fire-adapted biome”.

Several issues came into play, she noted: “People living in the park; religious groups using fire in the park; and urban development allowed on to the edge of the park.”

“Ideally,” Schmidt urged, “we need broad buffer zones between the park and the urban interface.” DM

[Richprins]

[Alf]

[Lisbeth]

OUR BURNING PLANET INVESTIGATION

Pyrocene Cape: Inside the furnace of Table Mountain’s fire starters

By Tiara Walters• 13 December 2020

Ill-timed blazes may be damaging the Mother City’s most famous natural landmark. And they have a lot to do with homeless campers, the roaming people who seek refuge on the mountain while the city sleeps below.

Covered in sandy, nutrient-starved soils, scorched by fire, and pummelled by the prevailing gale-force southeaster in summer, the Cape Floral Kingdom has persisted as a land of extreme paradoxes for millenniums.

Given the harsh conditions that assail life here, this world seems to have every reason not to be a botanical number cruncher’s wet dream: the untrained eye may hardly conceive that it gives refuge to nearly 20% of Africa’s flora on less than 0.5% of the continent’s surface. It seems implausible that some 9 000 plant species should thrive in these coastal extremities, 70% of which live nowhere else on Earth.

Yet, forged through the ages by a natural baptism of fire — as well as by mountains, soils, a Mediterranean climate and a somewhat stable geological history — the Cape Floral Kingdom is all these things. Its fine-leaved shrublands, or “fynbos” as the locals call it, represent the smallest but most diverse of the planet’s six recognised floral kingdoms. The 500-million-year-old Table Mountain chain and its newer national park, today surrounded by the metropolis of Cape Town, are the crowning glory of this floral cornucopia.

There are indeed pockets of renosterveld and fire-sensitive Afromontane forests in the 265km2 park, but, for the large part, it is flame-loving fynbos that bursts into a preposterously pretty palette after the annual winter rains.


Wild Malva (Pelargonium cucullatum), a perennial fynbos shrub, flowering in November at the Cape Point section of Table Mountain National Park. (Photo: Tiara Walters)

Nearly 60% of fires are started by ‘vagrants’

Blazes of an entirely different nature, however, have dominated the local fire regime in recent years, park fire manager Philip Prins told Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet.

Starting campfires, except in a minimal number of designated picnic spots, is illegal. Visitors may only stay overnight in recognised facilities. Yet Prins says that, in past weeks alone, crews have responded to and extinguished illegal “vagrant-caused” fires in various parts of the park, including Tokai and Red Hill towards the centre and south; and Oudekraal and Deer Park in the park’s northern sections.

High numbers of park visitors, and potentially illegal fires, may yet prove particularly true of the 2020/21 summer period.

“It’s just unbelievable,” says Prins. Head of the park’s fire operations since the reserve was proclaimed 23 years ago, he offers institutional knowledge spanning nearly 40 years of conservation service to the Cape Peninsula. Despite the hard lockdown this year, he says he has seen “a massive increase in visitor numbers”.

Fanned by a raging southeaster, Deer Park’s “Halloween fire” on 31 October has so far proven the largest of the spring/summer blazes to be traced to illegal campfires. To contain the inferno, which singed 50 hectares 0n the mountain’s frontal slopes, it would take 16 fire trucks heaving with up to 6 000 litres of water per tank, plus crews from across the firefighting spectrum: city, park and volunteer corps.

As for the previous summer season over 2019/20, there were 108 fires in the park, according to official fire-investigation data seen by Our Burning Planet. The majority of these blazes — 58% — were associated with fires kindled for cooking, heating and socialising. In a few cases, arson looked to be the cause. Additionally, the red wedge of the pie chart attributes 32% to “malicious” origins; while 9% were sparked by “negligence”. Much of it starting over summer weekends on the front of Table Mountain as well as adjacent Lion’s Head and Signal Hill, crews contained close on 90% of fires within 90 minutes.

“A lot of vagrants come in during the night, or late in the afternoon,” explains Prins. “They move from the city into the park and, early the following morning, they move from the park back towards the city, and so it continues.”


The aftermath of the Halloween fire as seen from the cable car, which burnt 50 hectares on the lower slopes of Table Mountain on 31 October. (Photo: Tiara Walters)

Thick bushes, watercourses and public drinking points on the mountain’s lower slopes tend to be a haven for illegal campers, driven into such spaces by poverty, homelessness and hunger. Shallow, overhanging caves, set a considerable distance from the urban edge, tend to attract church groups practising fire ceremonies. (Recently, the Noordhoek Ratepayers’ Association also reported that subsistence/muti poachers around the nearby wetlands use fire to flush out wildlife.)

Prins adds that “we now sit with a serious issue, not only with vagrants, but church groups, who tend to arrive on Friday or Saturday nights. One evening we put out a group of 50. Newlands Forest is especially popular. And, they divide into smaller groups, each of which has to make its own fire.”

To tease conspiracy theory from fact, and stitch together a bird’s-eye view of ignition trends, each incident is scrutinised by Enviro Wildfire Services’ Rob Erasmus, the park’s independent fire investigator.

In 2018/19, “vagrant activities” caused 32% of fires, marginally down from 2017/18’s 36%.

“We accept that the time period of three fire seasons is too short to suggest any significant trends,” Erasmus cautions. However, “to start determining patterns and trends, from 2017 we started tracking and keeping a record of all fires that we investigated within the park.”


The results — including cause and location — of the official investigations into the 2019/20 fire season in Table Mountain National Park. (Source: South African National Parks)

“I think it does require looking at the data,” says Nicky Schmidt of the non-profit organisation Parkscape, which campaigns for user safety within the buffer zones that abut the urban interface. “You could have few people doing this, but repeatedly. For example, in 2018 in Tokai, we had something like 27 starts over a two or three-month period. We soon realised the starts were on weekends, in the early hours of the morning. The pattern, and evidence found, tells you what you’re dealing with.”

Dr Jasper Slingsby is not as much concerned about “vagrants” as he is about people at large: “About 99% of the fires are started by people — vagrants or not. To my memory, the 2015 Cape Point fire, ignited by lightning, was the only natural fire to have taken place in the park for some time.”

Of course, Slingsby, a fynbos/biodiversity scientist with the South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON), is not referring to the great fire of March 2015. Igniting above Boyes Drive in Muizenberg and sweeping across the peninsula to Chapman’s Peak, it left a swath of significant damage, including destroying several properties. Here, again, the evidence tracks to an illegal campfire.

“A small fire was made to keep warm once entering into the low, thick cloud on the mountain that night,” Erasmus told Our Burning Planet. The accidental fire starter had “walked over the mountain from Muizenberg to Sun Valley … the fire either got too big or was left unattended once the person proceeded on their way.”

Home is where the hearth is

The human element aside, natural fynbos blazes should ideally ignite, on average, every 12 to 15 years as a result of dry, hot, windy conditions interacting with mature, indigenous vegetation. As Dr Alanna Rebelo of Stellenbosch University’s Department of Conservation Ecology and Entomology explains, well-timed flames are to fynbos what raindrops are to desert. “Most fynbos needs fire not only to flourish but to survive. This is because many fynbos guilds [types of plants] are dependent on fire to complete their life cycles.”

Enter the private lives of protea “babies”, stockpiled as seeds in closed cones, lying in wait for the rousing kiss of veldfire.

The fire, says Rebelo, “stimulates the cones. After the fire, the cones spring open, popping the protea seeds into the air and all over the ground. These seeds germinate, and more protea babies survive to the next generation, ready to make babies in time for the next fire.”

Some fynbos species have evolved ways to stuff their seeds in the ground, rather than in cones. “If they want to get babies from seed to adult plant, these seeds under the ground need to germinate. What germinates these seeds?” she asks. “The heat and smoke from fires.”


Burnt protea bushes after the Halloween fire on the frontal slopes of Table Mountain on 31 October. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

It is likely no one knew fire better than the Cape’s first people themselves.

Over time, these early agriculturalists had ample opportunity to gather mental data of the land’s bursting into abundance after good fire had rippled through it. They may have had such an implicit understanding of fire and its uses, the original theory suggests, that they would have used the practice of “fire-stick farming” to broker access to pantries of underground bulbs. This year, a South African/US study claimed to have unearthed vital clues supporting that hypothesis — the first quantified evidence of significantly amplified returns in post-fire fynbos.

Given this deep human-fire-fynbos symbiosis, it is tempting to dismiss contemporary human-caused fires from the park’s laundry list of conservation challenges — critical resources may arguably be better directed at tackling the cascading effects of climate change, poaching, litter and violent crime in a park that generated a pivotal R300-million for tourism coffers in 2018/19.

The area affected by the Halloween fire, for instance, had not received a proper burn in some 15 years, so this was one piece of land crying out for fire, Prins stresses.

Still, the science of fire ecology tells us that a “Goldilocks” confluence of conditions is necessary to maintain these natural cycles, which are delicate and may be easy to disrupt.

“It takes proteas a few years to make their cones. Fires that ignite too soon could end up killing the proteas before they have had time to set seed, leading to local extinctions,” Rebelo warns. “A fire that is too hot, due to invasive alien plants, could scorch underground seeds and kill them, as well as the organic matter in the soil, making soils hydrophobic. A fire that is too cool — in the wrong season — may not stimulate seeds at all, and only weeds may grow.”

Similarly, unseasonal fire “could also kill babies of animals that have timed their own life cycles with periods when there would be very low risk of fire”.

Slingsby, the SAEON biodiversity scientist, also notes that “increased fire frequency is the common story across fynbos because of added human ignitions. Parts of the mountain, such as the Cape Town City Bowl section, have burnt too frequently … if you consistently have hotter or more frequent fires, you’re going to see changes in the ecosystem.”

Although “very few fires are started by vagrants with malicious intent”, park fire investigator Erasmus adds that “any fire started by vagrants in young veld — five years or younger — is detrimental to the environment … In many cases this young veld consists of fine fuels — shrubs and young woody plants — that ignite and spread fire quickly.”

Last year, “a number of fires occurred in youngish veld”.

Thus, layer the ill-timed effects of bad fire on top of the rejuvenating effects of good fire and you feed too much fire into the system. And the Halloween fire’s timing, experts interviewed for this article agreed, was … well … somewhat off.

It was “very early for such a big fire” — the “official start of the Western Cape fire season is only 1 December”, says Prins.

Slingsby agrees the fire was “certainly early. Almost all fires happen in December and January. October/November fires are rare on the peninsula.”

Malicious or accidental fires, especially those that ignite out of season, may also conflict with issues such as firefighting readiness and fire management.

Cutting firebreaks, wide strips of land designed to stop fire from spreading, is an expensive, big operation: in the region of R2-million annually. This takes place once a year, and then largely within a certain time frame in November and December to avoid vegetation regrowth.

There is also the cost of the firefighter’s arsenal: the park helicopter is only on standby from 10 November each year; City helicopters are on standby from 1 December. Keeping a helicopter in the air now costs R36,000 an hour.

“We can spend up to R12-million on integrated fire management, depending on the season,” says Prins. “During a busy season, we spend more than that.”


The illegal camping site where the Halloween fire originated. (Photo: Rob Erasmus / Enviro Wildfire Services)

Grace under fire: Job on the job

During Our Burning Planet’s conversation with Prins in his office at the Newlands Forest firebase, the white-haired, bearded fire veteran wields an unwavering gaze as he sets out the occupational hazards of running a portfolio that unsurprisingly generates a lot of public emotion. His daily to-do list ranges from pacifying the fire Karens on the park’s fabulously wealthy urban edge to juggling the politics of prescribed burns.

“If we do a prescribed burn, the people complain,” he says. “They complain about the smoke. They complain about the ash. After the fire, they complain about the wind blowing ash into their houses and they complain about the wind blowing ash into their swimming pools.”

The point behind these burns is to reduce fire hazards, such as alien vegetation.

“And it’s a process we have to go through in terms of applying for permits, especially on the wildland-urban interface,” he says. “I think people definitely need some more education when it comes to that. And they also must take some responsibility — they can’t expect the park and the City to do everything.”

For her part, Rebelo suggests the debate on fire ought to direct its attention at what she considers to be the “root issue” — vegetation fuel loads, rather than only the ignition source and its associated “conspiracy theories”, whether the latter may involve supposed natural causes such as lightning; or human causes such as cigarette “stompie” offenders.

“Everyone makes a huge fuss about arson, and there are all kinds of conspiracy theories every time there is a fire,” she says, referring to the 2017 Knysna megawildfires as an example. “And while that is understandable, what about the officials/landowners responsible for the vegetation itself? It’s not only about ignition, but about fuel management. This always seems to be ignored. It is so much less exciting for people.”

She recommends allowing naturally ignited fires to “burn out” at regular intervals in keeping with the natural fire regime, “or you need to actively manage vegetation using ecological burns to make sure the fuel loads don’t increase too much”.

However, “authorities often do neither”, she argues. For this, she fingers an “unfavourable policy environment” as a “dangerous, counterproductive and passive approach to fire management”. In terms of prescribed burns, “if they start a fire, they are liable. In terms of non-prescribed burns, if adequate attempts are not made to stop a fire, the landowner on whose land the fire crossed is liable.”

She says putting out every fire and doing no ecological burns “results in ageing vegetation. When it does burn, it burns very hot, and can result in megawildfires.”

“There are some 50,000 or so landowners bordering the park, and everyone has their own opinion on fire management, but not everyone is well-versed in fire ecology and fire safety. Managing fire is really more of a people problem than an ecological problem,” says Slingsby.

Given what he calls “the practical and financial constraints”, he says the park’s fire department is “doing a world-class job, for the most part. We also need to consider that the human factor has distorted fire on the peninsula to such a degree that mimicking the natural regime through fire management is a huge undertaking and can be at odds with managing fire risk. For an ecological burn, you need the hottest, driest conditions.”

But that is not what you want for fire risk, he says, because it is hot, dry conditions that set off wildfires in summer.

He acknowledges alien vegetation as both a fire and an ecological risk but deems the issue “reasonably well managed — just look at the Cape Point section as an example … bearing in mind that alien vegetation is always going to be a problem. People forget that Table Mountain was once under the cover of 75% pine trees. The problem is budgetary constraints and, when funds do become available, there are other priorities to compete with, like security.”


Syncarpha vestita, commonly known as Everlastings or Cape Snow, flowering in November at the Cape Point section of Table Mountain National Park. (Photo: Tiara Walters)

‘More eyes and ears’

More lateral interventions may have to address a problem that Prins, due to retire next year, says has existed in the park for decades: “We manage a park in a city. We had a problem with vagrants in 1983 and we still have a problem with vagrants.”

In interviews with park staff, City officials and non-profit campaigners, two conflicting themes dominated: the obvious, staggering complexity of the deeply systemic social dilemma driving the phenomenon of illegal campfires in particular. And the need to police hotspots with increased patrols.

Parkscape’s Schmidt stresses that resolving issues “like this” is, well, Sisyphean in scale. The cycle of visitors ebbing and flowing through the park’s porous, flammable borders from a city of about 4.6 million people, and thus policing potential fire starters, may be akin to plugging the Atlantic with a sieve.

She observes that “indigent people have lived on the mountain for many years and continue to do so. It’s a difficult and sensitive issue, as is any issue of homelessness across the city, and reflects any number of unresolved social issues and failures.”

Within the park itself, the issue “begs questions of human rights versus environmental legislation”.

The park is home to sacred sites for church groups, she argues, so there ought to be ways of accommodating such practices, such as building firebreaks around designated zones that meet ceremonial needs.

“Flora and fauna may take priority in a rural park, but it doesn’t work like that in an urban national park with a diverse population with multiple needs,” she says. “Our Constitution is anthropocentric. It’s a people-centred democracy. We need protocols for an African country.”

Focusing on hotspots, however, she suggests, “the only way to begin to manage the situation is more eyes and ears, possibly drone usage — currently forbidden, and not without issue, in national park spaces”.

Her concerns speak to the regularity of policing as much as they do to the visibility of it: “Park users regularly complain about the visible lack of rangers, but that is what is needed here to prevent crime and fires, especially in the busier buffer zones, where fires, in particular, risk causing millions of rands in damage to property, and may even take lives.”

Andy Davies of the park-users forum Friends of Table Mountain (FoTM) is keen to point out that the group is “mindful of the housing crisis in Cape Town and South Africa at large. But the bottom line is Table Mountain is a national park. It is illegal to live on the mountain and unfortunately, vagrants are associated with litter, security and fire. This is where law-enforcement is critical.”

And, yet as both interest groups emphasise, being homeless in Cape Town is hardly a crime.

Few people understand this better than Hassan Khan, CEO of Haven Night Shelter welfare organisation, established in 1978. Khan is a well-known champion for the city’s homeless and is not convinced these roaming residents need lessons on making fire.

‘It is not illegal to be homeless’

Khan describes himself as a nature lover and passionate hiker who grew up in the suburb of Salt River, and made campfires in the mountain caves of his youth. He even watched homeless people in Van Riebeeck Park on the slopes of upper Oranjezicht stoking their own cooking fires during the winter lockdown period of June, July and August.

“Those fires were made of twigs between rocks next to a river. Three or four cooking groups used small pots — five litres max per pot. It’s totally impractical to have a big fire while you’re sitting with a small pot. You’re going to burn your hands and your eyebrows, nè?” he laughs.

“It’s just plain common sense, man,” says Khan, whose organisation runs 15 shelters in the Western Cape, nine of which are in Cape Town. It is the province’s largest shelter organisation. “Stack a pot like that onto some rocks, and you’ll quickly see it burns very efficiently and it burns out completely.”

Most veldfires ignite “as campfires left to smoulder when people go into their tents, and then the wind whips it up, but the cooking I saw didn’t cause fires and it was extremely unlikely to cause fires”.

Everyone wants pristine parks but few seem willing to support the most vulnerable people who have little choice but to survive on, or beyond, those park borders, he suggests. “Environmental fundamentalism”, as he calls it, is yet to integrate into South Africa’s democratic era.

“People love the park more than they love people, and much of that comes from an apartheid idea of South African society,” he says. “Environmentalists and academics always know where you can’t build houses for black people, but they’ve never been able to identify which areas are suitable for that purpose.

“The idea that poor people by their nature will go in and destroy the park is a fallacy. We don’t support them materially. We just make political statements from time to time. But if people were to find utility in the natural environment, they would protect it. We need to create good spaces for everyone instead of building fences, and just hoping for the best that future generations will still be able to enjoy these parks.”

Khan is also not convinced that the Covid-19 pandemic has created “an absolute increase” in the city’s homeless population: “It’s the movement of the same people” who have been displaced from their normal routines, and “they’ve certainly become more visible”.

When approached for comment on how the City of Cape Town may support park patrols, City officials suggested that they were doing enough; and that, short of reintegration, there was not much more they could do.

“The only solution to the challenges presented by street people … is through reintegration of people living on the streets, and mitigating the risk factors that result in them ending up on the streets,” says councillor Zahid Badroodien, mayoral committee member for community services and health. “Despite the best intentions of the City of Cape Town’s Street People Unit, it is a reality that many people simply refuse any form of assistance. They cannot be forced to accept help either, since it is not illegal to be homeless.”

Wayne Dyason, spokesperson for City law enforcement, insists that the Law Enforcement Tourism Unit “patrols the trails on the front face of the mountain. They have acquired ebikes to assist them with their patrols. The unit has been very active in the area.”

In its emailed response to Our Burning Planet, SANParks’ head office praises the City for being “very cooperative”, while also, somewhat ambiguously, hinting at past tensions: “[We] know how the problem is pushed to-and-fro if we do not act in concert.”

The agency adds that the “clearance of vagrants is complicated and sensitive; our forthcoming interventions will be within the law … We endeavour to roll the problem back, despite serious limitations that cannot be mitigated by SANParks alone … ”

A senior agency source speaking on condition of anonymity says “tens of millions” has been slated to be poured into a new mega security centre, one overseeing a range of issues, from poaching to crime.

The agency’s response confirms a “command, control and communications centre” has been launched without fanfare. This will cooperate with “TMNP SEAPLESS: Sustainable Environmental Asset Protection, Law Enforcement, Safety and Security”. The idea is to “rapidly grow from immediate intervention demands to a predictive analysis, not a quick fix; a sustainable and reliable partner in Cape Peninsula growth, safety and security”. The new operation is “loaded with the best professionals in our area of responsibility”.

Unlike the park’s current emergency helpline, currently first routed through the City’s “107” emergency-communication centre before finally reaching SANParks officials, the new centre will supposedly handle the helpline directly, hopefully eliminating further stressful delays.


The smouldering landscape and residual fire crews after flames had torn across Table Mountain’s lower slopes on 31 October. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

Such a streamlined service would not be without merit if the experience of the person who reported the Halloween fire tells us anything. That person was Professor Wolfgang Preiser, head of Stellenbosch University’s medical virology division.

“We saw the smoke and thought how irresponsible it is to make fire in a howling wind,” Preiser wrote in a social media post shortly after the inferno. “Fire was quickly getting bigger so we called TMNP [Table Mountain National Park] offices, were cut off about 10 times, and finally told to call Newlands fire station. Then everything was very fast — when back down, fire engines all over.”

Preiser confirmed to Our Burning Planet that he had written the post “following our short hike with family and a friend from Deer Park up to Tafelberg Road and back down”. Noting the smoke in the region of Platteklip Stream flowing down from the gorge, his description echoes the findings of the park’s official investigation, which traced the ignition to Platteklip stream near Deer Park below Tafelberg Road.

“The Platteklip stream site is a favoured location for vagrants,” says Erasmus. “While it cannot be regarded as an illegal settlement — there are no informal structures and it is not used on a permanent basis — it is, however, frequently used.”

At the time of writing, the fire starter or starters were still at large, although Erasmus says “it’s not impossible to catch such a person”.

“In cases where accidental or malicious fires are set, considerable effort is required to identify such people as they are both devious and cautious,” he notes. “We have been successful on a number of occasions that have resulted in plea bargains, hence the outcomes not being publicised.”

Once upon a renosterveld

On the hot, blinding morning after Halloween, 16 fire trucks stationed at Deer Park had become one. Like the ghosts of dead plants and animals, smoke columns ascended the charred slopes. The mountain’s sandstone and granite face reared up behind the curtain of twirling wraiths.

An owner of an urban-edge mansion who preferred not to be named was philosophical about life on the fringe of this flammable mountain.

“If you want to live in a spot like this, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth. You can’t complain because you’ve built a damn great big house where it’s not supposed to be,” he said. A thin shield of firefighters was all that had stood between his home and the fire the night before.

Still dusted with soot, he angled his shoulders to move back inside, but not before gazing out across his seared view.

“Sure, we’ve had too many fires, too often,” he said, but hesitated. “Look, I hate to blame somebody. When it’s someone throwing out a cigarette butt, that to me is inexcusable… but somebody trying to live? Everybody wants to talk and you can bet your bottom dollar there was someone trying to have a meal.”

The vegetation here would “burst back into life after the next rains”, Volunteer Wildfire Services wrote in a 2 November social media post and, on the other side of Kloof Nek Road separating Lion’s Head from the rest of the mountain, nature was already telling stories of renewal.

The March 2020 fire, still under investigation, had turned 60 hectares into a wild necropolis, the gargoyles of burnt-out cars presiding over it. But this year’s winter had proven a good, wet one for these inclines: in spring and early summer, Lion’s Head popped out carpets of Watsonias, Chincherinchees, vygies and the rest of the blooming party.


A blooming party of Chincherinchees (Ornithogalum thyrsoides Jacq.) on Lion’s Head in November, following a 60-hectare fire a few months before. (Photo: Tiara Walters)

However, two kilometres down the drag, where the Signal Hill parking area dips towards the Atlantic Seaboard’s wildland-urban interface, the slopes have burnt too often, suggests Prins. The dominant vegetation is fertile renosterveld — grasses, bulbs and daisies on nutrient-infused shale soils, rather than the typical proteas, restios and ericas of fynbos.

At least, renosterveld is what it is supposed to be. In images he is shown of the veld around the parking area, the University of Cape Town flora expert Tony Verboom also spots “weedy Eurasian annual grasses, such as Avena and Lolium; Paterson’s Curse (Echium), also from southern Europe; and Eurasian Plantago species”.


When fire and invasive alien plants meet in renosterveld, the net result is a weedy effect crowding out the local residents. (Photo: Tiara Walters)

Verboom, an associate professor, says human-caused fires exaggerate this weedy effect “by upsetting the natural competitive hierarchies and generating gaps that provide invasive weeds with an entry point”.

Impacts such as these that play out over time, Slingsby co-writes in an article on disrupted fire regimes. Initially, those shifts are barely discernible, but they tend to create slow, deep change to the very “structure, composition and function of ecosystems”.

“Kyk daar in die see — ’n belangrike man met die naam Nelson Mandela het eens op ’n tyd in daai eiland se tronk gebly,” a father pointed out to his young son in Afrikaans while Our Burning Planet was photographing the scene. [Look at the sea — once upon a time an important man by the name of Nelson Mandela lived in that island’s prison.]

Out in the bay below, Robben Island shimmered like an auburn mirage. At the father’s and son’s feet, a changing mosaic of renosterveld rippling in the wind.

“Bly mense nogsteeds in daai tronk, Pappa?” [Do people still live in that prison, Daddy?]

“Nee my kind, nou’s hy dood.” [No my child, he is dead now.]

And so it is in the 2020s that our ancestors and natural heritage are proxies for each other: without being told either existed, it becomes harder for the youngest among us to know that these people and things were once real, let alone how much they mattered to many.

It is here, across a liminal border of urban creep, that a hotter, drier climate age risks slipping into the smouldering heart of the Pyrocene Cape. DM/OBP

In the event of a veld or wildfire, click here for SANParks’ emergency guidelines.

[Lisbeth]

Pyrocene Cape II: ‘Out-of-control’ Table Mountain fire forces UCT evacuation

By Tiara Walters• 18 April 2021


The scene this morning around University of Cape Town, Sunday April 18, 2021. Maverick Insider Tim Richman

Autumn inferno erupts next to University of Cape Town, iconic Rhodes Memorial restaurant burns down

Temperatures soared to over 30 degrees Celsius as a fire broke out on the eastern flanks of Table Mountain on Sunday morning during near-windless conditions.

Enormous smoke columns could be seen from across the city billowing into the cloud-free sky over the city’s southern suburbs and near the University of Cape Town (UCT).

Click on the title in order to watch the video
Video clip by Maverick Insider Tim Richman

According to the City of Cape Town, its fire and rescue service had been alerted to the blaze at 8.45am.

“Fire crews were immediately dispatched to the scene, with the fire currently spreading from Rhodes Memorial toward UCT,” the City noted on its Twitter account.

Click on the title in order to watch the video
Video clip by Maverick Insider Tim Richman

“A section of the tea room at Rhodes Memorial has been destroyed and people are urged not to enter the area,” it added. “More resources are currently on their way to assist. These include teams from Working on Fire and Table Mountain National Park. Three choppers are also water bombing.”

NCC Wildfires, the firefighting services contracted to South African National Parks (SANParks), reported that the vegetation fire had started above Philip Kgosana Drive in the game camp area between UCT and Hospital Bend junction.

In the meantime, SANParks requested “all hikers within the Newlands and Rhodes Memorial area to evacuate with immediate effect. Cars parked within these sections need to be moved as a matter of urgency.

“The fire is currently out of control and we request that all onlookers please refrain from entering the area and keep the area clear for emergency vehicles to pass.”

This is a developing story. We will add details as they emerge. DM/OBP



Updates

• 14:10pm: UCT has confirmed on its Twitter account that “all UCT students have been evacuated from campus by emergency services support staff. We have taken them to pre-determined locations. We will continue to work with & support Sanparks & the City of Cape Town to extinguish this fire. Please stay safe first & foremost.”

• 14:30pm: The M3 inbound between Rhodes Drive and Union Avenue as well as access roads from Woolsack Drive and Princess Anne Avenue have been closed, according to a report by TimesLIVE.

• 15:20pm: The Western Cape noted in a statement this afternoon that “the situation is currently serious with the wildfire spreading towards sections of the University of Cape Town upper campus. According to Anton Bredell, minister of local government, environmental affairs and development planning in the Western Cape: ‘The public is urged to avoid the area and allow the authorities to do their work. The wind is slowly picking up which is a cause for concern. The City of Cape Town firefighting service as well as teams from SANParks and Working on Fire are on the scene already.’ ” He said authorities on the ground would inform all members of the public immediately should the situation get more serious.

• 16:05pm: SANParks has confirmed on its Twitter account that “the Rhodes Memorial Restaurant has unfortunately burnt down. The fire has also spread to the veld above the University of Cape Town (UCT).”